This studio course focuses on the connections between safety, children, families and guns. In collaboration with the Citizens for a Safer Pennsylvania organization of Pittsburgh, students will explore ways in which we can design our way into safer communities, and away from unsafe practices that cost and damage lives.

Within this studio we are exploring different design approaches to addressing a problem as wicked as this. To do this we are moving across the parameters of the social, cultural and political phenomenon that is guns within the context of the USA. From there we move to looking at the issue more locally, and we are doing this by partnering with the local advocacy organisation Citizens for a safer Pennsylvania.

The studio is part of the DESIS Network Lab (http://www.desis-network.org/). Working within this global context of the value of design education to enable social innovation and change, we as a studio community, are seeking out design solutions or propositions, to this challenging social issue. What this will be, how it will manifest will only be discovered through a critical interrogation and exploration through design in the studio.

The challenge for the studio is for us to work with Citizens for a safer Pennsylvania in their mission to raise awareness about gun safety and security, protecting children, realising a Child Safety Act in Pennsylvania – all on a shoe string budget with only one person leading the way.